The Sinking City 2: Frogwares Changes Genre and Delivers

Frogwares built its reputation on Sherlock Holmes: years of third-person investigative games where players gathered clues, linked them in logical sequences, and turned them into deductions. With The Devil's Daughter and then the more recent Chapter One, the studio had refined a precise narrative system, based on careful environmental observation and reasoned conclusion-building. When in 2019 it decided to bring that same philosophy to the Lovecraftian universe with The Sinking City, the result was a game that worked well where its investigative roots held up, and faltered where it ventured into less familiar territory, combat system included. The atmospheric promise was solid, the execution perhaps a tad more uneven.

The Sinking City 2, today, abandons Oakmont, abandons Charles Reed, and abandons the investigative structure as its primary engine. It transfers all its experience into a declared survival horror, complete with a new city, a new protagonist, and a completely inverted system hierarchy compared to 2019.

The question worth asking is not whether this choice is courageous, because it undoubtedly is, but whether it is consistent and to what extent the game gains something by losing something else in this transition (which we can't wait to see in the review).

Two Cities, Two Protagonists, One Mythology: What Are The Sinking City's Origins?

The demo provided by the developers includes two distinct scenarios, a church and a hospital, both disturbing enough to immediately convey the type of game The Sinking City 2 is. The following analysis stems from this direct experience.

The term "sequel" applied to The Sinking City 2 requires a calibration that promotional communications tend to omit. This is not a direct narrative continuation: we don't know what happened to Charles Reed, Oakmont is not mentioned in any of the playable materials, and the events of the first installment do not emerge in any of the documents or dialogues encountered. The two games share Lovecraftian mythology and the idea of a supernatural that manifests through forbidden rituals and creatures beyond all logic, a relationship of imaginative continuity that allows those who have never touched the first installment to enter without disadvantage.

The most interesting connection between the two games comes through the many documents scattered throughout the environments, built with an unexpected variety of registers: personal accounts, historiographical excerpts, traces of already compromised minds. Their main function is by no means decorative: they contribute to building a layered Arkham, with roots that delve back centuries, and those who played the first installment will find familiar names and institutions relocated to an older, darker context. Redemption Church, for example, is not new to those who remember Oakmont: it was already present in the first installment as a cult worshipping Shub-Niggurath, and finding it here with a history that long precedes the series' events is the kind of silent connection Frogwares offers without emphasis. Arkham, after all, is the city of Miskatonic University, the institution that runs through all of Lovecraft's narrative as a center of erudition that challenges what humanity should know: setting the sequel here means accepting a confrontation with precise expectations and an already consolidated geography of the imagination.

The two playable scenarios deliver environments with their own internal, sometimes brutal, logic. In the hospital, some doors don't open with conventional keys: the system requires using human faces recovered from the surrounding environments, a mechanic that condenses the horror of the setting and the need to explore every corner before proceeding into a single object. It's not an environmental puzzle in the traditional sense: it's a declaration of intent about how much Frogwares wants the player to feel uncomfortable doing the simplest things. The church, on the other hand, introduces characters with their own secrets and agendas, exactly as game director Alexander Gresko promises when he speaks of gray morality as an identifying trait of the story. Rafferty is compromised from the start, the involuntary cause of his own crisis, and this personal implication is already felt in these two environments: unlike Reed, who observed Oakmont with the detachment of a professional, our new alter ego inhabits the horror instead of cataloging it.

The Weight of a Revolver: Gunplay, Inventory, and the Grammar of Survival

The genre change is first and foremost evident in the gameplay, and to understand how radical it is, one only needs to recall the structure of the first installment. Investigation was the primary verb: gathering clues through occult vision, populating the Mind Palace, choosing between narrative solutions with divergent consequences. Combat existed but was secondary, often clumsy in execution, with awkward character movement that made encounters more of an obstacle to overcome than a conscious design component. In The Sinking City 2, this hierarchy explicitly reverses: combat, survival, and exploration take center stage, and the declared reference point is no longer the Sherlock Holmes-style investigative adventure but classic survival horror. The DNA of Resident Evil and Silent Hill is recognizable in resource management, the pressure of encounters, and the exploration of environments that do not forgive distraction.

The gunplay works with an arsenal of period weapons: revolvers, shotguns, Thompsons, fists, and kicks. Encounters require reading enemy behavior and aiming at their weak points to take them down while consuming as little as possible, because every shot fired is a resource taken from the inventory. And this is where the systems begin to interact: a finite inventory turns every encounter into an economic decision, not just a tactical one. Carrying extra ammunition means sacrificing medical kits or items needed to unlock areas on a second pass. This pressure is not fixed, however: by exploring carefully, it's possible to find items that expand available space, gradually shifting the balance between what can be carried and what must be left behind. Inventory management thus also becomes an axis of progression, parallel to combat but closely intertwined with it.

The chosen difficulty radically changes the balance of this economy. On easy difficulty, the game is generous, resources are accessible, and mistakes are forgivable. On hard difficulty, enemies have more health, consume alarming amounts of ammunition, and some can respawn after being defeated: this transforms every already explored area into a risk to be re-evaluated, making backtracking, which the semi-open world structure actively encourages, an operation that requires taking into account what is encountered, not just what is sought.

Character progression unfolds on multiple levels. Dream Essence, crystals scattered throughout the environments, enhance Rafferty's abilities and are obtained by careful exploration, often guided by the environmental narrative itself. In parallel, there is a talent system based on runes, organized into increasing rarity levels: from basic ones, like Chitinbound which reduces damage taken from monsters and aberrations, to intermediate and advanced talents that more substantially modify the approach to combat and survival. Equipping the right runes is not an aesthetic choice: it concretely changes which situations one is able to face and which are more sensible to avoid, building a playstyle that develops over time instead of being defined at the beginning.

The optional investigative layer fits into this framework as a third development path: the environment is littered with objects and traces that tell what happened in each place, and those who choose to stop and read them gain concrete upgrades, access to otherwise locked areas, and narrative variations. Those who prefer to ignore them are not blocked, which represents a clear break from the Mind Palace of the first installment. The systemic doubt that remains is whether these progression paths are legible enough to coexist: when managing inventory, monitoring health, and keeping an eye on enemies that can respawn, stopping to gather clues requires a mental availability that the game itself, with its constant pressure, might make difficult to maintain.

What a Detective Cannot Do: Structural Differences Between 2019 and 2026

The survival horror that The Sinking City 2 aims to inhabit is not the same as five years ago. The Silent Hill 2 remake has redefined what it means to bring psychological horror to a contemporary engine, Resident Evil 4 Remake has shown that frantic pace and survival tension can coexist without one sacrificing the other, Alan Wake 2 has pushed the boundary between narrative and gameplay in a direction few expected. These are titles with budgets, technology, and development teams of a different scale than Frogwares, and it would be dishonest to ignore that. The comparison is not about quality: it's about the proposition. What TSC2 can offer that these titles do not is a specificity of setting and tone that canonical Lovecraftian Arkham guarantees in a way that is difficult to replicate: not horror as spectacle, not the monster as a boss fight, but the perception of a world built on incomprehensible rules that precede and survive the player. It's an ambitious promise, and the demo suggests that Frogwares is taking it seriously. Where the title exposes itself to comparison, however, is on the plane of technical execution and combat refinement, terrains on which the cited studios have raised a bar that a medium-sized studio structurally struggles to reach.

Then there's an issue concerning those who have followed Frogwares for longer. The audience that played the Sherlock Holmes titles and the first Sinking City has built a precise expectation of the studio: deduction, layered narrative, the intellectual pleasure of gathering scattered pieces and seeing them compose something coherent. Frogwares is asking that audience to follow it into territory where these satisfactions do not disappear but become secondary, available to those who seek them and invisible to those who do not. It's not a betrayal, but it is a renegotiation of the pact with players, and renegotiations of this kind always come at a cost. The risk is not that the game will be worse: it's that it will be perceived as less "theirs" by those who had learned to recognize that voice. The choice to keep the investigative layer optional seems to respond precisely to this concern, a gesture of continuity offered to those who don't want to lose the thread entirely. Whether that's enough to retain that part of the audience without diluting the coherence of the new design is, again, a question that only the finished game can answer.